Secretly Canadian; 2004

Find it at:

Maple Leaves EP

Secretly Canadian; 2004

Find it at:

Critics and fans alike tend to treat EPs like promises, equating full artistic realization only with full-length albums. There are lists of the best singles and albums, but no one's counting down the top ten extended players of the 90s. To an extent, it's because EPs have grown out of traditional vinyl singles and mutated into something less like a single-and-b-side and more like an album in miniature.

But where is it written that LPs are the most legitimate form of artistic expression? Jens Lekman, who hails from Sweden, has already released two EPs this year: Rocky Dennis and Maple Leaves. Combine both and you've got a short, choppy album, so it's better to leave them separate as two well-realized half-albums of delicate chamber-pop songs full of waltzing strings, 60s-style flutes, and sundry psychedelias. Lekman sums up his musical approach best: "I know every song, you name it/ By Bacharach or David/ Every stupid love song that's ever touched your heart/ Every power ballad that's ever climbed the charts."

Of the two, Rocky Dennis is by far the more ambitious EP, and the least successful. Its namesake was the real-life inspiration for the 1985 movie Mask, long forgotten by all but Lekman and a few Bogdanovich completists. Roy L. "Rocky" Dennis suffered from craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, which swelled his face to twice its normal size; he died in 1980 at age 16. Lekman sees the perpetual teenager as emblematic of his own skewed emotions and his dreamy quest for depth and meaning in life. On "Jens Lekman's Farewell Song to Rocky Dennis", he sings, "I wish I had a proper reason to cry/ A reason not so abstract/ More like a broken clause in a contract." While his overidentification with Dennis reflects an intense post-adolescent romanticism, it also seems a little exploitive, as if Dennis were John Merrick to Lekman's Michael Jackson.

If Rocky Dennis feels a little truncated, it's because the concept determines the EP's shape. It's too thin to merit a full album, but four tracks just can't develop these ideas enough, especially when one of those tracks is only a minute's worth of orchestrated strings, with no vocals and no discernible theme. It's telling that the EP's best track, "If You Ever Need a Stranger", is the only one not specifically about Dennis.

Much less troubling and much more rewarding is Maple Leaves, which lacks its mate's overarching concept but still sounds more fully formed and unified. The title track explodes in a symphony of keyboards, flutes, and curiously danceable drums, as Lekman sings about mishearing his lover's doubtful words: "She said we were only make believe/ But I thought she said maple leaves." "Sky Phenomenon" and the cover of the Television Personalities' "Someone to Share My Life With" float along on his nimble piano and gentle baritone, which occasionally recalls Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan. The EP's best moment comes with "Black Cab", a killjoy's lament about ruining a party, but not wanting to go home. A monologue delivered from the rear seat of a taxi and accompanied by harpsichord and mandolin, it perfectly communicates the unshakable dread of wanting to be anywhere but where you are and anyone but who you are.

Lekman's youthful anomie is intense enough not only to excuse some of his missteps as merely oversincere, but also to redeem them as steeping-stones toward a larger goal. You could call him pretentious, but his pretensions are so rawly naïve, his musical influences so particular, that these songs sound genuinely unique and wholly personal. His vision, coupled with his youth (very early twenties), places him in an early-2004 minitrend of young artists like Patrick Wolf and Nellie McKay, both of whom have released staggeringly ambitious debuts exhibiting an incredibly strong grasp of style and genre. Lekman's vision is never as ostentatious as Wolf's nor as charmingly psychotic as McKay's, but he seems to have mastered the subtle and never-so-simple trick of balancing joy and misery, such that neither overwhelms the other. That he does it in such a short time-- both EPs add up to only about 25 minutes-- makes each song all the more bittersweet.